When it comes to politics, we have a tendency to see the presentation of policy as somehow disreputable, even dishonest. We talk about ‘spin’ and ‘lines to take’ as if they automatically equate to deception; but this is to forget that politics is not just the business of ideas and administration, but of persuasion. Having […]
The Prime Minister is in Germany, his first visit to the country since taking office last month, and it is inevitably being billed as an opportunity to ‘reset’ the United Kingdom’s relations with Europe. Keir Starmer has met the Chancellor of Germany, Olaf Scholz, four times already since 5 July, but this is a set-piece […]
The Ukrainian strike into Russian territory around Kursk, which began on 6 August, has been cause for cheer among those who support the right of Ukraine not just to defend its borders but to exist. By crossing into Russia in considerable force, the Ukrainian armed forces have changed the narrative of the war and unsettled […]
One of the less edifying aspects of the recent public disorder and violence in British towns and cities has been a spiralling, combative discourse between the Government and Elon Musk, owner of social media platform X. The Texas-based billionaire is both a forceful advocate of free speech and a long-time internet provocateur, but ministers and […]
The Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Phillipson, issued a written ministerial statement at the end of last week, Whitehall’s preferred method of saying something without necessarily wanting anyone to notice. In it, she announced that she intended to halt ‘further commencement’ of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023. This legislation introduced by […]
‘I don’t need any more troops and I don’t need any more money.’ It was a striking message from General Sir Roly Walker, chief of the General Staff (CGS), not much more than a month into his tenure as the professional head of the British Army. He was speaking in the margins of the Royal […]
The Labour government has been in office for almost a fortnight, and one message is being emphasised with an efficiency and discipline which would make Lord Mandelson hug himself with joy. It is a simple one: everything’s broken, and the Tories broke it. And it’s all worse than we thought. Wes Streeting was first out […]
No one likes elephants in the room. It takes determination and bloody-mindedness to ignore them beyond a certain point, but Keir Starmer has shown surprising stamina in turning a blind eye to the herd. Trumpeting more loudly than most is the elephant marked ‘public infrastructure’. Any politician can win easy plaudits at the moment by […]
You have to go quite far back in the political archives to find a government with a straightforward and easily defensible record in immigration. New Labour fulfilled a manifesto commitment by scrapping the ‘primary purpose’ rule in 1997, with net migration tripling the following year, and Tony Blair catastrophically underestimated the scale of movement from […]
Constitutional reform is a difficult issue in politics, because it is complicated, important and, to most people, quite boring. Those who do take an interest, conversely, often inflate its significance. The Labour Party’s manifesto restricts constitutional change to a modest few pages, which may seem appropriate given the other challenges facing the country. Yet Keir […]
When Nigel Farage announced earlier this week that he had changed his mind and would offer himself as a candidate for Parliament, he described the election campaign so far as ‘boring’. Many would disagree: from the Biblical weather of the Prime Minister’s announcement, through national service and Keir Starmer’s renewed enthusiasm for nuclear weapons, to […]
After a period on the margins of public attention, the public inquiry into the government’s handling of the Covid pandemic has returned to the foreground with the delayed appearance of the Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case. He had been due to give evidence to Baroness Hallett’s review last October, but had to take medical leave from […]
The request for arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, by the International Criminal Court has given critics of the war in Gaza an enormous boost and the apparent endorsement of an impartial international body. It is one of the ICC’s few forays outside Africa: warrants have only […]
Recently, I felt a counterintuitive pang of sympathy for John Swinney, Scotland’s new First Minister. It may not be the last. The 60-year-old former Finance Secretary became leader of the Scottish National Party without a contest last week, the party choosing to avoid a potentially divisive election, and he is trying to present himself as […]
This week, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that the impending delivery of General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft to Ukraine was a ‘purposeful provocation’ by the West. As some models of F-16 are technically capable of carrying tactical nuclear weapons, Russia has warned darkly that their deployment would push the conflict to ‘the […]
Last week, during a visit to Poland, the prime minister caused a mild media stir by announcing that the defence budget would rise over the next five years until the United Kingdom spends 2.5% of its GDP on the military by 2030. This was framed as a major boost to the country’s capabilities and resources, […]
The right of the British political spectrum is currently an arena of vicious hand-to-hand combat. Touchstones like immigration, gender identity and integration are central to the fighting, but some combatants deny their rivals are even in the appropriate place. With depressing regularity we hear accusations that some of those engaged are not really conservatives at […]
One of the principal villains in Liz Truss’s new memoir-cum-manifesto, Ten Years To Save The West, is the ‘deep state’. This idea of a network of unaccountable and often secret institutions controlling government was popularised by Donald Trump (although its origins are Turkish) and Truss has enthusiastically embraced the notion. The ‘deep state’ trope, she […]
The satellite imagery was dramatic: China has constructed a replica of the presidential palace and government buildings of Taipei in Alxa League, a remote area of Inner Mongolia. It hardly requires a suspicious mind to imagine that these facilities could be used to train soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army for an assault on the […]
On April 1, almost three years after the legislation received Royal Assent, the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 will come into force. It was devised under Nicola Sturgeon and introduced to the Scottish Parliament by her second Cabinet Secretary for Justice, one Humza Yousaf MSP, in response to a 2018 report on […]
